1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to provisioning storage in a storage system and more particularly relates to provisioning storage resources by modeling new storage units after existing storage units.
2. Description of the Related Art
Data storage systems facilitate storing large amounts of data for multiple users across one or more networks. In order to manage the flow of data within a large data storage system, a storage resource manager server may be necessary to manage the storage resources throughout the storage system, including monitoring storage assets, monitoring storage usage, reporting events, and provisioning storage resources to clients and applications to satisfy storage capacity requirements for each client.
Provisioning storage in a storage system refers to allocating physical memory for a specific application or client. One way that a storage resource manager server provisions storage resources is by making available resources, such as logical unit numbers (LUNs) available to the application or client. The storage resource manager server also may create new logical unit numbers (LUNs) prior to assigning them to a specific client.
When provisioning resources throughout the storage system, the storage resource manager server conventionally must specify certain parameters for each LUN. These parameters may include the storage server, the storage pool, the connectivity between the client and the storage server, and the RAID type of the storage pool. Additionally, the parameters for newly provisioned LUNs may be client-specific—each client may require or perform best using a certain size, type, or otherwise distinct LUN structure.
Conventionally, a storage system administrator must manually provide all of the parameter inputs associated with a specific client, application, and storage resource. This creates significant demand on the storage system administrator to manage the potentially unique attributes associated with each of the specific storage resources. Furthermore, the uniqueness of the attributes of various storage resources makes it very difficult, even impractical, to specify a general, static attribute policy that would apply to all newly provisioned LUNs.
What is needed are a process, apparatus, and system that automatically provision storage resources according to a policy, thereby relieving the storage system administrator of the manual entry of detailed provisioning policies and unique storage resource attributes.